But that requires a knowledge of phonetics. A ridiculous amount of people don’t even know basic grammar; phonetics? Yeah rite. In this case, the “soft” and “hard” is a direct translation from Spanish, from how we were taught how to tell whether something had to be spelled with a double or single r or with a j, g or gu. I can assure you that 4yo Spaniards don’t know the first thing about phonetics, but they know which member of a close phonetic pair is “stronger” or “harder” than the other one.
For Serbian speakers it is definitely the use of indefinite and definite articles (a/an/the/or nothing). I have yet to meet someone around here who has actually mastered it. The only people who have a feel for it are those who lived abroad in English-speaking countries.
Also spelling is a tough one, as well as pronouncing the “th” sound.
I second this, regarding Chinese students (Mandarin speakers). After some intensive learning the problem areas: articles and; agreement.
The former is a subordinate clause.
Having lived in Sweden for eleven years now, I’ve heard a lot of English from a lot of Swedes. Time and time again the same errors appear, making me think that for some reason Swedes in general have problems there. There are two I probably hear most though, one of which I understand and one just seems bizarre.
Teach/learn.
Swedish doesn’t really make this distinction. They both use the same verb “lära” but if you add a particle to it “sig” (which changes depending on who: sig, dig, er etc) it changes from “teach” to “learn” (kind of, simplifying a bit there). So the word for “teach” sounds pretty much like “learn” and then you have to mess with it to actually get “learn”. I can understand the confusion. It doesn’t help that English speakers will jokily use phrases like “that’ll learn ya” as well.
Months.
Swedish uses “månad” for “month” and “månader” for “months”. They have a plural form. Yet, for some reason, an insane amount of Swedes just use the singular form in English. I just don’t understand it. “The project will take three month”. Perhaps it is the difficulty of pronouncing the “s” after the “the” sound. I don’t know.
Just thought of another one. House/Building.
Swedes use “hus” to mean “building” and “villa” to mean a “house”. Thus they use “house” to mean “building” when speaking English as “hus” sounds like “house”. Thus I apparently work in a house even though I am sitting on the eleventh floor. I feel like hugging Swedes that use the word “building”.
So there you go, the three most common mistakes made by Swedes when speaking English, as brought to you by amanset.
An ESL student once asked me about three questions he’d missed. My impression was he thought the test was wrong, and I could hardly blame him. The only one remember was that he was asked to interpret:
A: “Isn’t she pretty?”
B: “Isn’t she!”
Q: Do A and B think she’s pretty?
Willie Mays is a native speaker and famously made this error during an interview as a rookie. “Am I an exciting player? No, I just do my job and let the fans get exciting.”
I did it on the phone to a telemarketer. It went kind of like this:
Her: Hej! Jag ringer från … (Hi! I’m calling from …).
Me: Förlåt. Jag är inte intressant. (Sorry. I am not interesting).
<gap of a few seconds that felt like forever>
Her: Va? (What?)
Intressant/Intresserad. There’s a fine line.
Speakers from certain dialects don’t do it jokingly at all, the Jamaicans I knew always did, and did it in all seriousness. I don’t know which dialects do it, though, or even if it’s still done in Jamaica nowadays (my Jamaican acquaintances had all left the island in the 60s and 70s).
Oh man, I’ve worked with many, many Filipinos and they did this all the time! It occasionally got pretty confusing. I assumed the same thing, that maybe the pronouns in Tagalog are such that they don’t make the distinction.
What was the correct answer?
Obviously “yes,” but if the test was administered in print only, the student had a point, since that would have been poorly contextualized.
This is the SDMB. We assume that people have the capacity to Google or Wiki terms they’re not familiar with (or just ask).
Yes, they did think she was attractive.
ETA:
I disagree. No native speaker of English would be confused by this. Granted, it’s not how people tend to talk in 2011, but its meaning is unambiguous.
I confess to have forgotten the exact question (it was decades ago) and just took a (poor) shot at reconstructing it. But it was phrased to do a good job of testing whether ESL student understand that “Isn’t she!” sometimes has the idiomatic meaning “She is!”
The pronunciation of Russian vowels depends on which syllable in a word is stressed. So the vowel “o” is pronounced with its full value when it receives the stress in the word. If it appears in a syllable immediately preceding the stressed syllable, it is pronounced like “ah.” If it is further removed from or after the stressed syllable, it is pronounced like “uh.”
So in a word like “moloko” you have the same vowel three times, but three different pronunciations: muh - lah - ko.
That is just one example with one vowel, of course. But there are similar rules for each vowel.
As for “v” being pronounced as “g,” that only happens in limited circumstances, such as the word for today (spelled as “segodnia” but pronounced as “sevodnia”) or in masculine/neuter genitive singular adjectives.
Well, yeah, but the test wasn’t for native speakers. The functional nature of such language is inherently tied to intonation. To test it as a discrete item without audio is almost pointless.
It is a test to measure their English ability. You need difficult questions such as that one to differentiate people at the top of the scale. I agree with the other posters that the meaning is unambiguous. What context can you add that would change the meaning?
1.) It’s *testing the fluency *of the non-native speakers, which would be completely useless if all it did was lob easy “gimme” questions at them.
2.) The meaning is not tied to intonation. It’s perfectly clear from the structure of the sentences, including their punctuation. Compare:
Isn’t she pretty?
Isn’t she!
Is she pretty?
She isn’t.
Isn’t she pretty?
No, she isn’t.
These are all very distinct exchanges to a native speaker of English, and their meaning is easily distinguished even when they’re written instead of spoken.
3.) The simple fact that no L1 English speaker would be confused by it while an L2 speaker was proves that it’s a good question for gauging fluency.
At the level we’re discussing in this thread (e.g. voiced/unvoiced distinctions, rough comparisons of sounds in different languages), phonetics is far simpler than grammar.
Phonetics is, in a way, strictly rule-based. For example: if, during exhalation, you tap the back of your tongue against your soft palate without vibrating your vocal cords, you will produce the phoneme /k/ (Spanish caro, English car) regardless of what language you speak natively. All the sounds of natural human speech can be described and rendered this way, giving second-language learners a way of accessing unfamiliar speech sounds in a precise manner.
A negative question (just as a tag question) can be a true question, an assertion, or seeking confirmation, depending on intonation. The designer of this test item needs to decide if the purpose of the item is functional, grammatical or about punctuation, because without more context, it’s muddled. I’ve seen (and rejected) many test items like this. This one probably had a good point, but often things like this are thrown in more for the amusement/interest of the teacher, rather than to actually assess competence.
Just “Isn’t she pretty?” *by itself *would be ambiguous (e.g., “Marcie was rejected from the beauty pageant,” followed by “[But why,] isn’t she pretty?”). However, “Isn’t she pretty?” followed by “Isn’t she!” can pretty much only be interpreted one way by a native speaker.